These, Clara, Flora, and Harriet, were very pretty, and very highly educated—that is to say, they could do everything that is useless—play, draw, sing, dance, make wax-flowers, bead-stands, do decorative gilding, and crochet-work; but as to knowing how many ounces there are in a pound of tea, or how many pounds of meat a person should eat in a day, they were utterly, entirely, and most elegantly ignorant. Towards the close of the last century, and at the beginning of the present one, ladies ran entirely to domesticity, pickling, preserving, and pressing people to eat. Corded petticoats and patent mangles long formed the staple of a mid life woman’s conversation. Presently a new era sprang up, which banished everything in the shape of utilitarianism, and taught the then rising generation that the less they knew of domestic matters the finer ladies they would be, until we really believe the daughters of the nobility are better calculated for wives, simply because they are generally economically brought up, and are not afraid of losing _caste_, by knowing what every woman ought to do. No man thinks the worse of a woman for being able to manage her house, while few men can afford to marry mere music-stools and embroidery frames. Mrs. Yammerton, however, took a different view of the matter. She had been brought up in the patent mangle and corded petticoat school, and inwardly resolved that her daughters should know nothing of the sort—should be “real ladies,” in the true kitchen acceptation of the term. Hence they were mistresses of all the little accomplishments before enumerated, which, with making calls and drinking tea, formed the principal occupation of their lives. Not one of them could write a letter without a copy, and were all very uncertain in their spelling—though they knew to a day when every King and Queen began to reign, and could spout all the chief towns in the kingdom. Now this might have been all very well, at least bearable, if the cockey Major had had plenty of money to give them, but at the time they were acquiring them, the “contrary was the case,” as the lawyers say. The Major’s grandfather (his father died when he was young) had gone upon the old annexation principle of buying land and buying land simply because “it joined,” and not always having the cash to pay for it with, our Major came into an estate (large or small, according as the reader has more or less of his own) saddled with a good, stout, firmly setting mortgage. Land, however, being the only beast of burthen that does not show what it carries, our orphan—orphan in top-boots to be sure—passed for his best, and was speedily snapped up by the then beautiful, Italian—like Miss